1. Technical Field
The invention relates to electronic transactions. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and process for establishing and maintaining a transaction ID that enables a merchant to track a transaction over all systems and tie back any activity against such transaction over time.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In order for a credit card transaction to be processed, it must go through a set of intermediary entities until a resolution is established. For example, an e-commerce transaction can include: a merchant server makes a request for funds; the transactional data is sent to the acquirer server, which sends the transactional data to the card association server for verifying compliance with the credit card association; the transaction is then forwarded to an associated issuing bank server for funds availability and settlement determination. Upon such determination, the transaction is then re-routed backwards through the process. Each component in each step of the process requires certain information in a specified manner. Because of this constraint, each step of the process requires from the next step of the process not only that step's requirements, but also the previous step's requirements. The end result is that the burden is on the merchant to offer different information in different electronic formats to satisfy the data needs of each intermediary entity at each step of the transaction process. Each intermediary entity takes the informational data it needs and passes the transactional data onto the next intermediary for the next step.
Because the merchant server is the last step in this chain, the merchant server presently does not have its own unique format or information attached with any particular transaction. Furthermore, a merchant does not necessarily have the capability of creating such a transaction ID. Barriers to a merchant having capability of creating merchant transaction IDs include that the cost for development can be prohibitive and overwhelming for a single merchant and also that coordination among merchants may not be achieved because the intermediary entities may not allow for each merchant to create its own proprietary system.
The effects of such a disjointed system and process fall entirely on the merchant. Further problems a merchant can encounter include the following:                Often, there is no certain transactional match throughout the life cycle of the transaction because the many different systems involved use different and unrelated identifiers in their messages and logs;        Reconciliation of a transaction, if at all possible, takes a lot of time because a merchant can't use its own identifier to search the database hosted by the acquirer;        Reconciliation of a transaction, if at all possible, takes a lot of manual labor because of the prior condition. The merchant has to use non-specific search criteria, such as card number and dollar amount of a transaction, which produces multiple matches that must be sorted through manually; and        Exception items which are often presented months after the original transaction are difficult to research and reconcile because the lack of a transaction identifier (transaction ID) makes it difficult or impossible to retrieve the original transaction.        
It would be advantageous to provide a computer implemented system and process to facilitate a merchant identifying and tracking a particular transaction at any stage during the lifecycle of the transaction; to improve time for reconciliation of transactions; to automate reconciliation of transactions; and to organize transactional data in a meaningful way for improving transactional processes during the lifecycle of a transaction.